Last.FM vs. Pandora vs. Slacker Radio (best internet radio)

[blaw789]

I thought it might be nice to start a thread about which radio app users like best.

I just got my Droid but I frequently use Pandora and Last.FM on my computer at work.

Last.FM - Seems like the service has a better list of artists than Pandora so i switched to it on my PC recently. On Android the service is the same but as an app it tends to be open in the background all the time and suffers from not being able to pause (like the PC version). The scrobbling could be nice for some users and it links to the android player.
Sound Quality seems excellent, best of the three so far.

Pandora - Haven't gotten to use it too much because it takes so long to load my station. Any thoughts?
Sound Quality seemed fine with my limited use.

Slacker Radio - Has the most music options of the three and seems likes the best application. It has plenty of options like keeping the screen from freezing while plugged in and on wifi without having to change your phone settings. Had to stop listening from poor sound quality though!
Sound Quality started ok but a bassy boom and click started appearing after a few songs, forced to switch to Last.FM.

Others? Thoughts?

 

[Carl C]

For those in the UK their is the "Absolute Radio" application off the Market to listen to... you guessed it....Absolute Radio

And if you download "Beebplayer" you can stream Live BBC radio such as Radio 1 etc.

 

[sleepyEDB]

Don't forget about Tunewiki...an awesome app that combines a player for your SD Card music with both Shoutcast and Last.FM radio stations. Very nice indeed.


sleepy

 

[mrqs]

any particular reason you didn't mention spotify?

 

[cherry]

1) AOR - Android Online Radio app
2) DroidCherry to listen to CBS Radio stations
3) DroidCumulus to listen to all cumulus stations...

 

[KlaymenDK]

Before Pandora blocked their int'l users, I used to *love* them (I may still, but without access it's a moot point).

So now, I'm using Last.fm, although clearly Last is a far cry from 'learning' what you like, and playing specific 'stations'. I like it enough to be a subscriber (which also 'justifies' that I am using their Android client even though it's not available to me from the Market).

On the pc, there was a period where I used Musicovery a lot (in spite of its very funky interface).

When I need to 'get in the zone' at work I frequently listen to mazemod (yeah!). I guess I'm and old geezer.

When I do listen to traditional FM radio, I frequently find myself wanting to press 'Love' or 'Skip'.

 

[wmm]

The main beef that I have with Slacker is that it takes too much interaction to start and stop it. With Pandora, I just click on the shortcut icon on my home page and it starts playing the last station I was listening to. The exit command on the menu stops the application.

With Slacker, you have to pick a station to listen to before the music starts, and it always nags you to upgrade to the paid version whenever you exit. Not fatal flaws, but annoying.

 

[hempwallace]

Do any of you get skips for the first 10-15 seconds of most songs?

I get this with Slacker (seems the worst), Pandora, and LastFM. I haven't tried the others.

 

[tliebeck]

I would've been tempted to buy a Slacker subscription but for the fact that they seem to run extremely low bitrates to their mobile clients, even on wifi. Does anyone know if they have plans to fix this? It otherwise seems to be a great service when used from the computer.

I've yet to try Last.FM, Pandora does seem to work reasonably well.

 

[KlaymenDK]

You get skips within the same song with Last.fm? Really?
The Last client is made to skip to the next song in case of a drop-out, so if you do that could indicate an issue with your sound card/driver rather than the player.

 

[wmm]

I've never had a skip, nor even a buffering pause, with either Pandora or Slacker. I haven't tried last.fm, so I can't say anything about that.

 

[messenger13]

PANDORA

 

[Xavion2004]

PANDORA

Great sound qualit on the hero, was paused for about 5 hours and started right back were I left off.

 

[crankerchick]

Pandora here and no real issues. When my coverage is not so good, pandora takes longer to start the stream and may take a few more seconds between songs, but I guess I expect that when the connection is slow. I don't experience this on WiFi at all and even use the higher bitstream when I'm on WiFi.

I don't particularly care for last.fm so I haven't tried their android app yet.

 

[wmm]

I had a strange issue with Pandora this morning, and I think it happened once before, too. I was driving along and suddenly Pandora stopped. When I switched to the Pandora screen, the "play" button (the right-pointing arrow head) was showing instead of the "pause" button (two vertical lines), but there was no album art on the screen. Pressing the "play" button did nothing; pressing the "stations" button (the stack of horizontal lines at the left) gave a blank screen. When I exited and started Pandora fresh, everything was fine. This was after about an hour of play time in my car. I have a Nexus One on T-Mobile.

 

[vincentp]

Pandora was my preferred app for a while. I found that it was better for playing music similar to what I put in than Last.FM was. The sound quality on Pandora seems to be a little bit better than Last.FM as well. However, if I just want a shuffle, Last.FM does a much better job of giving me a variety of music, so I've been using that fairly extensively. I have had some weird problems with Last.FM though where the widget will stop responding and I have to open the program to change songs.

Slacker - I never really got into this one. I used it a couple of times and it was buggy beyond belief on my phone. It may have gotten better now, I'm not sure. I've also been using Grooveshark lately - 3 bucks a month to use the Android app. It's worth it to me, and the newest version seems to have worked out a lot of the kinks.

 

[OfTheDamned]

I use Slacker. The customization that they offer (via the website) is far superior to anything else I have tried. I have a couple of custom built stations that play exactly what I want to hear. The sound quality is not as good as it used to be on my BlackBerry, but from what I read in their forums they are working on it.

Pandora never plays the music I actually want to hear. I can create as many stations as I want and it does everything in its power to avoid playing the main artist for that station. Drives me crazy. The sound quality is actually pretty good too. I may just scrap my account and start from scratch to see if it will fix it.

Last.FM works pretty well, but it plays the same songs way too often. If I am listening for a few hours I will almost be guaranteed to hear at least 5 or 6 songs more than 2 times.

 

[alostpacket]

I have them all installed. Why limit yourselves?

 

[eNons3nse]

You get skips within the same song with Last.fm? Really?
The Last client is made to skip to the next song in case of a drop-out, so if you do that could indicate an issue with your sound card/driver rather than the player.

I've actually been kinda annoyed by that feature of last.fm. I'll be driving around in my car trying to listen to it and it will just start playing the first 15 or so seconds of multiple songs in a row. Presumably because of dropped connection, but it can't be that bad. I've ran 128kb/s shoutcast stations on DroidLive all day in my car and never had interruptions.

 

[wmm]

Pandora has one similar kind of glitch. If I forget to turn off wifi when I get into my car in my driveway before I start Pandora, the Pandora client on the phone will connect to the server using the wifi signal from my home network. When I drive off, the phone loses the wifi connection and switches to 3G. About 30 seconds later, Pandora exhausts the buffered music it downloaded and reconnects over 3G, but it's not able to continue the song it was playing and switches to a new one.

That's the only time I've seen that with Pandora, though.

 

[flammenwurfer]

I've had the last.fm and pandora apps and both worked well. On the computer I use and kind of prefer last.fm. Although Pandora is very nice as well. I ended up uninstalling both of them and now I just have tunewiki installed. It will play my sd card music, play last.fm and also scrobble everything I play with tunewiki, including the music on my sd card. It also displays lyrics along with the song if you want. Mobile karaoke! haha

The only complaint with tunewiki is that when listening to last.fm you can't select a genre. You can enter artists and listen to your recommendations and everything, but you can't listen to "Alternative Radio" or anything. I've mentioned it to the devs so hopefully that implement that soon. It's a great app though.

 

[InstantKarma]

Slacker keeps closing when I go to the home screen. Is that normal? 'Cause it's unacceptable to me.

 

[wmm]

Slacker keeps closing when I go to the home screen. Is that normal? 'Cause it's unacceptable to me.

Doesn't happen for me on my Nexus One. It keeps playing in the background, just as I would expect.

 

[tchiky]

Hi!
Pandora and Slacker radio are not available in my country - Portugal.
I have found tv243.com a great alternative for it.
love music

 

[Bob Loblaw1]

I've been using Pandora but I get these annoying screeches every one in a while so I've downloaded Last FM, Slacker and Tune Wiki. I'm going to try them all for a while and see which one works out the best.

One thing I've noticed so far about Slacker is that I can't figure out how to shuffle my radio stations. With Pandora you can do a 'Quick Mix' and it will randomly pick songs from all your stations or you can tell it which stations to choose from. Does anyone know if you can do this with Slacker? I haven't checked Last Fm yet.